Richard Allen Morris’ exhibition of new paintings, which just opened at the R.B. Stevenson Gallery in La Jolla, comes at the end of a decade in which the once relatively obscure painter from San Diego, always an artists’ artist, has become nationally and internationally acclaimed. His paintings and sculptures have been acquired by both leading museums and private collectors.

Love of paint: Morris, enamored with the thickness of the paint in his recent works, is thinking of experimenting with making even thicker ones that he can mount on stands, displaying them as topographic or relief sculptures.

Quotation: “My work is not all that intellectual, but it does have a certain clarity to it.”

Works by artist Richard Allen Morris hang in the R.B. Stevenson Gallery in La Jolla where a solo exhibition opened Saturday.— Nelvin C. Cepeda / UNION-TRIBUNE

Richard Allen Morris is a thrifty fellow, as he will readily tell you. He always has been.

“It’s something I got from my parents,” he says.

They experienced the Great Depression, and Morris did, too, as a small child born in Long Beach in 1933.

This was a fortunate habit, too, since for much of his adult life he just managed to get by. His art didn’t supply him with a steady income. He worked in bookstores — the last 16 of those years at the much beloved, widely revered and now sadly defunct Wahrenbrock’s Book House, until he left in 2005.

But something unexpected happened to the 76-year-old San Diego artist, along his steady path of producing stellar paintings and assemblages while working in relative obscurity: Collectors began to acquire his work in healthy numbers, in Los Angeles as well as San Diego. Then, his renown spread to Europe: German as well as Swiss venues and collectors embraced him enthusiastically.

At the moment he has an exhibition at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York and another, a solo exhibition titled “Patch and Paint,” opened Saturday at R.B. Stevenson in La Jolla — his local venue for more than a decade. (It continues through July 24.) A gallery in Zurich, Hausler Contemporary, is planning a mini-retrospective for August.

Still, fame has affected him very little. Morris remains the same self-deprecating artist he was in his era of semi-obscurity, which stretches back to 1956, when he first came here — and stayed — after a stint in the Navy.

For the show at Stevenson, Morris is showing all new paintings, which is a departure from past shows that mingled work from various decades. The paintings are small and so thick with paint you might start conjuring up associations with frosting on cakes or scoops of ice cream. It is this intense attention to paint and the creation of sensuous, beautifully colored surfaces that makes Morris such a superb painter.

Surrounded by his new compositions at Stevenson’s space, still to be installed, he tends to discourage any large claims for this work.

“Much of what I’ve done here has been done before, I’m not any kind of genius.”

There are quite a few who would beg to differ. John Baldessari, a native of National City and one of the major figures among the originators of conceptual art, helped him land a show at Chac-Mool Gallery in Los Angeles in 1999, along with another friend and admirer, abstract painter James Hayward. That sold well, as did his show a year later at Stevenson that carried the apt title, “Through Thick and Thin.”